Thingness

New Filing Cabinet

2008-03-16T22:04:00.001-07:00

www.marksussman.org

Door and Knob

2007-11-10T13:28:00.001-08:00

In the office there is a room Alice has never entered. It has a doorknob and hinges, and Alice walks by it on her way to the copy room. If Alice bothers to do the math, she will figure out that, given its distance from other known rooms and the distance of room's door to the oft-trodden hallway that runs behind the the room, plus the known distance of the floor to the ceiling, the room must be less than or equal to fifteen feet in length, twelve feet in depth, and seven-and-a-half feet in height. If she bothers to ask her co-workers what is inside the room, they will quickly change the subject. If she tries the handle, it will not turn. If she knocks, there will be no echo - her knuckle's thud will die before leaving the door's wood. If she works late one evening, dragging her bones across the keyboard for hours past the cleaning woman's last round, she will think she hears an incantation just penetrating the door to the room. The language will be strange, but she will have no doubt that its words are directed at her. If she hears the murmured language, she will get closer, and she will know its murmur and rustle is for her. When there are silences between the mutters, she will know those are for her as well. Still, if she happens upon the door late at night, when she should be home replacing her marrow, she will not try the knob, though she has some glimmer of what's behind it. She will know that it will not open.

Some Trees and Some Crackers

2007-10-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

Recall a game you played as a child: you put your hands on a tree, close your eyes, and count to one hundred. You open them, turn around, and your friends are gone, so you go home and eat starchy snacks. Alice works in the office that clarifies and enforces corporate policies for the workers that manufacture and distribute such snacks. Because of her efforts, little yellow crackers have, in your mind, become synonymous with "quality." Alice pops her knuckles and the world becomes visible just over the tiny, cheese-flavored horizon of the cracker's edge. Your memories are governed by rules, like any other branch of the company. Alice makes sure everything runs smoothly, the olfactory sensations kick in just so, you open a box of crackers, you feel bark beneath your fingertips, you see a wisp of adolescent fabric shrink from the corner of your vision, and the world of the trees disappears as you count, one, two, three ...

Disposable Skin

2007-09-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

The season begins in hope and slowly unravels until only its cork'd center remains. Alice has nothing left to show for her tribulations -- she has buried the silverware, she has wrapped the baby hamsters in plastic and sent them floating down the river in hopes that they might find themselves adopted by the pharoah. They were prized once; an infusion of royal blood will set their little hearts pumping. In a possible future, their organs sit beneath the earth's surface in mason jars stalked by snakes.

Alice lives in a quiet, suburban pile of rubble. Every morning she sweeps part of it away, binds her bones together in rubber bands and heads to work in disposable skin, a paisely flesh she bought off the rack. Co-workers find themselves hypnotized as Alice's lungs expand, as she weazes out clouds off ash. Her forearms sit limp on her desk for most of the day. Her pancreas splurts bile and the office explodes into applause. Not much work gets done, the company's going under, but the Workers With Disabilities Act protects what remains of Alice's ravaged frame. She pours milk over romain lettuce and goes face first into lunch. Her hands flop about, semi-autonomous and clacking against office-desk material. Around three, when swirls of humans clot the coffee rooms, Alice's skin begins to flake and peel. She spills fluid as she jangles toward the door at the end of the day. Frank is a pervert, but he takes pity on her and shuts down her computer, as her clicking finger does not click, but bounces uncontrollably.

When she returned to the office after the fire, everyone applauded her mutilation with flavorful martinis. They chucked her on the chin like her father. They lashed their sadness to Viking boats, but could not spark the flint in that kind of weather. They sit, forever docked, ready to burn, and so they celebrate Alice, returned from Elysian Fields with an every-changing array of tarps holding her insides inside, a gift from the Gods.

Sense of an Ending

2007-07-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Alice finishes the final installment of J.K. Rowlings's Harry Potter series and feels a lingering sadness. It's over and so is her childhood. Boo-hoo, thinks Alice. At least she still has witchcraft. So she grinds a wooden stake into the middle of the putrescent carpetting in her living room, douses the place in lemon vodka, and has her formerly sunny disposition bind her to the wood as she ignites a spark using only her profound understanding of spatial relationships. As the flames consume her, she despairs, realizes it's no consolation, and tattoos her now-ashy skeleton with the same twisted pattern that adorns her ex-bride's face. Sitting in the living room's smoking remains, she ponders transmigration's metric weight, its proper accenting, utters the word, and, as if in an underwhelming dream, the television turns on. A blind horse gnaws peanut butter and appears to talk. Alice mouths some words too, it doesn't matter which ones. She and horse are speaking the same language. The horse's show ends, but Alice's jaw keeps working, the hinges creaking, soot falling like pencil-scratched lead residue.

Alice Takes A Bride

2007-07-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

Rather than concede that, yes, a corpse is the totality rather than the excess of life, Alice gave in to a life-long fantasy and bought a mail-order bride.

The bride arrived two weeks later, still frazzled from the whirlwind cab ride to the airport, then the plane ride with two layovers, then the cab ride to Alice's apartment. Alice took her inside and attempted to make the bride a sandwich, but the bride simply looked at her as if to say, "Not without a ring." Alice pulled off a ring and slid it onto the bride's finger, which seemed to placate her, though the bride's cyrillic mutterings could well have been annoyed talk about home and hearth and such. Alice made a sandwich of various pig parts, and the bride ate it happily, despite her culturally acquired dietary restrictions.

After the bride finished eating the sandwich, a kind of silence fell over the kitchen. Alice picked up the plate, carried it to the sink, and rinsed it off. There was a kind of humming that was always present in the kitchen, and Alice tried to think of a gesture that would express the phrase, "Sorry about the humming, there's nothing I can do about it." Nothing leaped to mind. Alice looked at the bride and realized that she was humming along with the humming sound, humming at exactly the same pitch as the whatever machine in the kitchen's bowels generated that noise. Alice took it as a sign, or omen, or something - a sound preordained, some perverse sphere song. This Russian broad was really something, something mythically tuned-in to the house.

Alice climbed the staircase and the bride followed her, and the door closed behind them, and they both made noises that, thinking back, were pretty hilarious.

The Hyper-Condensed Pocket of Pure Distance

2007-06-23T13:23:00.001-07:00

There was some kind of distance carried by the air. Alice moved down the sidewalk from concrete square to square, but everything around her carried some kind of space within it. She moved forward one step and found herself in the middle of a hyper-compressed pocket of what seemed like pure distance. Everything was, I don't know, really far away seeming, and the next chunk of concrete slunk horizon-wise as she approached it.

A curious feeling, she thought, moving through totally unoccupied, utterly vacuous space, while nothing around her moved. She walked forward, but the trees stood their ground, refused to fall behind her. She could not cross to the next chunk, even as she pushed forward. The hyper-condensed pocket of pure distance totally enveloped her. She turned left and ran, and still, though she was certainly moving, she was not going anywhere. There was a weirdly uneven temperature, and as she ran and ran, though the sky was clear and the colors sharp around her, she passed through shifting climates, cold patches and gelatinous globs of amniotic warmth.

Alice just kept moving. What the fuck else was she supposed to do?

The Poets

2007-06-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

Alice decides to approach things as though everything were more or less over. The night is still and underfucked, a tree in the back yard does absolutely nothing. She looks out the back window, but it's dark outside and light where she is, and all she sees is herself where the outside should be. She grits her teeth and strains her neck. Her lips peel off her teeth and her neck cords strain against her skin and her eyes are open very wide. Everything is more or less over anyway, so who cares what she looks like? There is a table and a chair in the background and her lips peel off of her teeth and her neck cords strain against her neck.

She wonders what someone would think, someone walking into the room like they belong there. They would think, "Hey, there's Alice staring at the window," or, "Alice looks like a test pilot in a wind tunnel," or they would note simply note the most relevant fact, that the night was underfucked and looked it. This person would then make a sandwich and retire for the evening, leaving Alice at the window, her neck cords straining at her neck.

Historically, Gods have had insatiable and varied sexual appetites, and the poets have depicted their various fuckings and awkward morning metamorphoses. Alice recognizes that looking at the whole situation as if it were already over might offer some possibility for poetry, whereas the scene itself, her straining at her own skin and trying desperately to get the tree in the backyard in her sights, is merely a present reality, subject to breathing's sustenance and just the ho-hum of a churning body. Somehow, afterwards, if she were a God, the poets would get a hold of her and then the window, the sandwich ... that would be something.

W.A.S.P.

2007-06-16T14:05:00.001-07:00

I spent the morning trying to crush a wasp with a broom. It lighted on a curtain in the kitchen and stabbed downward at nothing at all, which might as well have been my face. If I puff up and my cheeks fill with blood and pus, just open the window and I'll float out and out of your life, and you can wonder if the wind has blown me toward the hospital, or further into the territory. When the swelling goes down, I'll return and do you the courtesy of a proper answer: yes, it was the hospital, and now my blood is in a jar on a shelf and my skin is antibiotic. I'll come home and the wasp will flit and light and so on, and eventually I'll pick its body from the broom needles.

The Hinges

2007-06-09T13:01:00.001-07:00

While humming along to the tupperware burps' satisfied stomach sound, Alice realized that this world's endless ostinato could give no quarter to the rabid critter burgeoning in her. So rather than gas, rather than pills to stop the floppy-eared Κέρβερος from loosing itself on the world, she went to her garage, and dusted off a six-sided crate covered in pre-war ewe droppings that a Sinti hairdresser had given her two-time amputee cum laude father in exchange for a workable definition of the holy ghost. The box's hinges, of which it had thirteen, had rusted open years earlier, and Alice remembered miserable weekend cleaning excursions devoted specifically to crushing the spiders and thwacking away at the top of the box - she tried for eighteen years to loose the metal coils with force, when she found out later that all you had to do was rub a dove on it and it would cackle.

But, standing in front of the box in her garage, feeling that something licking the backs of her eyeballs with its dog-haired tongue, she knew the box, firm and opinionated, would not open. Not even the multivalent logics of mammal-based physics would coax it open. She stood, the tupperware belching, the ewe drops aglow, her eyeballs tongued by an oxygen starved-something, and she slapped at the top of the box. But it would not open. She read the fable about the fox and the grapes, and then the one about Achilles and the tortoise (though she didn't finish it), and then mispronounced "Koran" as "Qu'ran." Exhausted after four days of trying to remember the melody to The Pelican Brief's opening credits, she finally devolved into telling stories about her life, like the dream-substance she saw embodied in Lenny Bruce's post-OD ass smiling up from the bathroom tile and the metaphysical dilemma it provoked in her father before the war, and the first time she saw a racist hug a lemon tree. She sat in the corner, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around shins, sucking at her own teeth, and peered around the pile of discarded high school yearbooks at the box with its infinitely chaste dove-greased hinges.

Finally, the tupperware all but exhausted, the thing licking her eyeballs now complacent, knowing it was only a matter of time, she relented and, heaving her body up from the floor, pendulum arms swaying as she lumbered forth, she moved toward the box. It took hours, but navigating the viscous air-conditioning and the Hellfire Club decoder rings, she came to it and sat down beside it. She gave her teeth a suck, and a piece of broccoli left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis ceased its mourning. She reached over and worked her finger nails between two wooden panels, heir entry aided by the ewe droppings which, though tough on the outside, yielded an oily xylem once broken. She pulled and a panel came off. And she pulled again and another panel came off. And she pulled again. And she pulled again. And she pulled again, revealing the box's contents, of which there were none. The bad dog behind her eyes began its screaming and she could feel its paw pushing out, distorting her skull's delicate contours into bulgy hillocks. And jaws snapping interior brain air. Still she kept pulling and pulling, and soon only the lid floated before her, the virginal hinges still clamped, holding tight to the wood and also nothing at all except air.

Her hands moved fast around the lid, and already a dog mouth was making its way out of Alice's mouth and it pushed pornographically out and out. She had only the frame of the lid left, its hexagonal outline still attached to the hinges, and she pulled away at that as she tasted dog snot. She pulled down hard on the last plank and it came free. The hinges floated in the air for a moment, and then they opened with a snap. The tupperware was quiet, though filled with a kind of burnt-plastic vomit. The hinges fell to the ground and they clinked on the ground and were still. The dog was still, it closed its eyes, its torso hanging halfway out of Alice's mouth. The dog and Alice fell to the ground, and she put her hand over the hinges, and the hinges were stuck there between skin and the cold garage floor.

Prize Fighter Endeavors to Start a Flower Shop, But Then Just Punches Someone Instead

2007-06-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, objects that go into their concepts always leave behind a remainder, an obscene protrusion into a alogical world - this is to say that objects always give their concepts the finger, but behind concepts' backs.

Yes, there is more thingness, there is always more thingness. There is always more thingness than you can handle, because things are giving you the finger behind your back. The tragedy, some philosopher said, is that you don't know what the finger looks like.

Give up on things? Before you go totally internal, they've given up on you, even before the always already. They piss on "always already." They're always already "always already," but even more so.

Give up on things? Who the fuck do you think you are?

Darker, Darker

2007-01-02T22:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.movingbyremotecontrol.blogspot.com

My Business Plan Is Immaculate

2006-11-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

What the FUCK

I'm no longer given over to excursus or tangential tangents - I'm thinking about Gertrude Stein repeating a bunch of things over and over - But not exactly repeating them: compounding them - Her verbosity is the most concise.

The blank page is always a blank page, even if it has writing on it.

A blank page is never a blank page, it is always a palimpsest.

For a few weeks, when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I had two words stuck in my head like a song: "grain silo." I don't know where I heard them, but they were there for weeks on end like the residue from a halogen bulb after you close your eyes - faintly humming, layered over every other thing. Particularly at night, I whispered those words to myself, they were coming out of my lungs weighted equally with the air. And then one day I forgot about them, and now they are phallic towers in midwestern flatlands. Now they are places where farm girls lose their virginity and hunched over ex-scarecrows go to vote - they're in washed-out gray tones and I don't sleep with them anymore.

Dead Academics

2006-10-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

This strikes me as odd: Michael Berube's new book Rhetorical Occasions.. Note the cover. Really, really unusual for an academic to make it onto the cover of his own book, even if that academic is as prominent as Berube. Unusual, of course, unless that academic is dead. Creepy.

Oh, and you can go to Berube's blog, where he is probably writing about you even as we speak.

A Tumbler Full Of Rocks

2006-10-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

The time was more or less right. We gave up our hopes for burgeoning limbs and set out one-footed into the Westchester lights, the crowd-breath at our back, and t-shirts cut and rearranged as sails. It was summer-autumn, lodged at the top of the turnover point of the day's last second, we teetered, subdividing seconds into halves and halves of halves, until we could no longer resist the fall. It was the quarter of our resurrection and we stumbled forward, the crowd-sighs gliding us forward and forward. The autumn was autumnal, and thus it fulfilled its promise.

Draining the Tributaries

2006-10-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

I get off of the train and a crowd from a Queens-bound F Train is pouring down the train. I can feel the wind from the pressure shift, and I wonder if I can catch the train about to pull out of the station, but then also I'm thinking, My God, all of these people have had sex. Ok, not all of them, but like 95% of these people have had sex before - especially because it's around 3:00 and most of the people coming down the stairs look like either the type of people who don't have to work that much (lots of time for sex) or students of some kind (ditto, maybe).

There are a few who look downturned, I'll say harassed maybe, but their harassments are leisurely - these are the harassments of dry cleaning not being ready, or bad service at a restaurant, as opposed to the kind of harassments that come from .gov email addresses. And to them I say, good for you for not being virgins.

Pedagogical Devices

2006-10-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

Things I Have Said To My Students So Far This Semester:

1. It's like when you leave the house without brushing your teeth. You know something's wrong, but you don't know what it is until you see the bus coming.

2. I don't want to grade your finals.

3. Because you're late. All the time.

4. Just pretend that Barbara Ehrenreich is a murderer.

5. Yeah, you should check out some Norman Mailer. He's good. And he's an asshole.

6. Ok, well answer this question, then: is it early, or am I just totally boring?

7. No. Nope. Really close. Uh ... no. Yes.

8. Obviously the physical thing is not working out for me.

9. This is the Newton end of things. I just thought you should know.

10. Candid teacher moment. So, uh, are you guys learning anything?

Losing: An Interrogation

2006-09-28T21:38:00.002-07:00

INTRLCTR: And you dislike it?

PSajak: Yes.

INTRLCTR: It doesn't feel good?

PSajak: No. Not even for a second.

INTRLCTR: When you take it away?

PSajak: No. I would give it all away. I would give everything away if I could.

INTRLCTR: You're a generous man.

PSajak: I'm not generous. I'm nothing. Everything is contingent, which is as bad as predestination, when you think about it. Absolute and total human freedom, sure, but what does that get you when the world of human thought and action is composed of a nearly infinite series of contact points, each of them subject to pressure from a whole range of different forces at any given moment? Ideological, physical, interpersonal, egotistic, and so on. This is as bad as total anarchy. Absolute freedom, yes, but what does is it come to, is what I'm asking. There's no real decision when you are subject to so many others, and so many other things, that are decided all around you, constantly.

INTRLCTR: But there is salvation on the smallest human scale, right? If only by reconciling with ourselves these forces. Surrender can become a kind of victory, as long we're willing to concede that the battle was lost before we ever had a chance.

PSajak: Typical bourgeois attitude. We never had a chance, so why be sore about it? Fuck you. You don't know the shit I've seen, the loss I've witnessed. The human soul sifting through the sieve of a body too caught up in the vacillations of chance to notice its own depletion.

INTRLCTR: That was very poetic.

PSajak: You don't know the shit I've seen.

INTRLCTR: Well, you are syndicated.

PSajak: The syndicate ...

Through a Gnarls, Barkley

2006-09-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

Now is the time to put away childish things.

Except for this blog.

Grad school's started - as close to the literal vise-on-the-brain as I'll get without actually putting my brain in a vise. It's not so much the readings, or the classes, but the pressure of the ether, the intoxicating smell of work clouding the hallways (in which I always get lost - my school is labyrinthine).

I find that William James, who suffered bouts of anxiety and a couple of nervous breakdowns, is an incredibly appropriate first reading.

Aesthetics, thanks for making the world.

LOGOSrhetoricPARALYSISvomit

2006-09-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

There is no better way to say this, so I will just say it the way it was told to me.

Last night, I paid for my coffee with some stray jacks, a ball of twine, and a jar of nails, when it struck me all at once that this was in fact the utopia I had been looking for since leaving home some five years earlier. The economic castration and ill-painted dormitory replica furniture - it's milk crate sheen lusted over by fawning middle-weight girlfight horsetrainers - these were the revisions and plasterings-on-walls for which we had paid with several spare organs. It landed me in the stocks in Town Square and I came away with tomato on my face and a heavy load in my genes. That night we paid with some cartoon bits of barter - yeah, and IT WAS ALL..............RIGHT MAN!!!! Thanks, capitalism - your essentially sunny outlook has taught me this: while we're all chained to the shitting post, at least we can sell our neighbor's own fetters back to him for a 40% profit!

AU REVOIR, you fucking coffee guy!!!!!!!!!

andafteralliwasastillbirthnotbadforadamnedspoteh?

Use Your Protrusion

2006-08-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

The one-year passed without ceremony. From the bowels of a snack-food corporate office this blog was shat out upon the world, and you, so like a pack of stray dogs, sniffed it with disinterest, occasionally courting its disease with your tongue.

Thanks for reading.

An Arabesque is Exactly Arabian

2006-08-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

Currently heat vaporizes thought and pixel as well - everything gets sucked up into the sun and now my words go too. Biofeedback is taking all of the juice and turning it into more juice - BUT WE'RE RUNNING AT A LOSS HERE PEOPLE and business is business. A body is not a corporation - luckily.

Pitchfork Music Festival was fun, despite the airline moebius stripping.

My temp gig ends tomorrow, a week earlier than expected. Anybody's got some spare cash floating around, I spackle and dance for paper. Not all at once.

Epistle to Van Dyke Parks

2006-07-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

Lacerated on the fjords, I saw your word jumble set to brain-print by an unfortunate tumble and comical run-in with a horn'd goat. All Good Things Come Again.

Also, I have another piece up at Printculture.

Stay tuned for more inscrutable prose concerning Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and Dracula and also the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Not a Seymour - Stop Insinuating

2006-07-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

It's come to my attention that, if you're viewing the RSS feed of this blog, every post for the last few months has ended with the sentence, "You've been fed, Audrey." I don't know why that happens, but it's not me. I've ended every post with, "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my brownies. Because they're delicious." Now that's what I call unimpeachable.

Syllepsis, the New New Anti-Drug

2006-07-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

While the komodo dragon's tail can strike with enough force to break a man's legs, only its cold indifference can break my heart.